On this month's cover, a child with cancer interacts with a nurse caring for her at home. We chose this photo in recognition of National Hospice and Palliative Care Month, observed each November to raise awareness about these areas of care and their value to patients and families.
According to a 2019 report by the Center to Advance Palliative Care and the National Palliative Care Research Center, the number of hospital palliative care teams in the United States is growing-nearly three-quarters of hospitals with 50 or more beds report having them-but access to palliative care services is highly dependent on geography, whether a hospital is nonprofit or for profit, and hospital size. In this month's Perspectives on Palliative Nursing column, "Integrating Palliative Care into Nursing Care," Parekh de Campos and colleagues make the case for training all nurses to provide palliative care in order to meet an expanding need for such services in U.S. health systems. "Given the shortage of specialist palliative care providers, proficiency in palliative care is an ethical obligation for all nurses," they write.
Use of hospice care is also on the rise in the United States: a 2021 report by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization found that utilization of the Medicare hospice benefit increased 3.9% from 2018 to 2019. However, the report found racial disparities among utilization, with White Medicare beneficiaries more likely to enroll in hospice than beneficiaries of all other races. This month's AJN Reports, "Hospice Has a Diversity Problem," explores U.S. racial disparities in end-of-life care and within the hospice nursing workforce-including the reasons behind it and what can be done to address it.-Diane Szulecki, editor